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Musings Report 2017-13 4-1-17 The Unexplored Importance of Collective Memory
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The Unexplored Importance of Collective Memory
If we want to understand the forces reshaping our world, we need to go beneath the surface narratives and explanations, which tend to be data-based (economics, demographics, etc.) or holdovers from past eras that people naturally attempt to apply to the present: what worked in the past will work in the present is a natural assumption.
But not this time. The narratives being used to explain our current difficulties no longer align with either the era or the facts. Applying the same old solutions that worked in the 1940s - 1960s no longer gets the desired results.
Many of the most important narratives cannot be quantified by economic or political models. They have little to do with conventional economic models of human behavior or conventional left-right partisanship in the political sphere.
Chief among these hidden explanatory narratives is Collective Memory. I was introduced to the term by correspondent Bart D. in a recent email:
"I've been quite enjoying a couple of second hand novels from our local charity bookshop. “Firelight and Wood Smoke” and “Applewood” – two parts of a trilogy.
Written in the late 70’s by a farmer born in 1938 in southern France and who was also involved in French politics under De Gaulle.
Clearly writing from personal experience and observation and recollections from his older relatives, they are great studies of how people relate to each other at the various levels of : self, family, ‘extended family’, friends, community, region and nation. But also relationship to place, history, economics, politics, religion and technology. Set in the timeframe 1901 to 1968 – tracking the progression of generational change.
The story certainly made me think differently about ‘the process of getting older’.
Probably impacted more on me than the average reader since I grew up in circumstances in some ways similar to parts of this story, and in a place where the impact of ‘progress’ on agricultural technology, community and economics was highly visible. (Sadly, now entirely erased from the landscape and collective memory)."
Our collective memory is our storehouse of knowledge about our landscape, how to be productive in our community and how to interact with others in our community to sustain it rather than disrupt it.
Once this collective memory is lost in the living, the individuals and community have in effect forgotten how to be productive and function as a community.
This collective memory is lived, not simply recorded. Reading about a distant past doesn't give us the tools to actually inhabit that world.
I recently came across an insightful essay, Midwestworld, about Greenfield Village in Michigan and the complexities of nostalgia.
"There are, of course, different kinds of nostalgia, some more flexible than others. On that day, there was a restive energy throughout the park, as though the collective longing that had brought us here was undergirded by something more desperate."
Nostalgia is typically dismissed by conventional culture as romanticized sentimentality, viewing a not-so-great past through rose-colored glasses, but the point I see in this essay is that it has a core role in our collective memory.
Nostalgia is a form of mourning for what has been irrevocably lost in our collective memory--ways to live and work that have been lost. It's not always simple to convince ourselves that "progress" has been entirely positive.
I spent some of my high school years in a classic plantation town--owned lock stock and barrel by Dole Pineapple. My friends speak with nostalgia for those days because "life was good": the social and the economic lives of the residents were stable. From the outside, the "plantation" might have looked exploitive (the Company exploiting the poor workers), but the unionized workforce had the sort of security that is becoming increasingly rare.
I worry that the collective memory required to nurture self-employment and self-reliance have already been lost to much of the populace. Marx summarized the effect of capitalism as "everything solid melts into air," and Bart's comment helps us understand that it isn't just ways of earning a living that melt into air, it's the collective knowledge of the landscape, old technologies that may still serve the community, ties to previous generations and much else that together form a way of life and a place-based, sustainable mode of production.
The world we inhabit now is much more insecure and disconnected from the landscape and the community. As people move to find employment, they lose connections to a place and the community in that place. As "rootless Cosmopolitans" they move between jobs and places in urbanized zones, a way of life in which developing any lasting community of collective memory becomes essentially impossible.
Many of the skills needed to become self-employed and self-reliant are in danger of being lost to younger generations. These skills reside not just in individuals but in the communities that connect them: if one individual doesn't know how to get something done, he/she will likely know someone else who can. Solutions and practica; knowledge are rarely more than three individuals away in a tight-knit, stable community.
The Internet is enabling virtual communities and "tribes," and there is much that is positive in this expansion of ties and interactions with others. But it remains an open question if these digital ties will provide the same level of security and support as place-based communities.
This brief overview barely scratches the surface of collective memory, which calls into question the entire trajectory of the modernist form of "progress" that strips away community, place, collective memory, generational ties and the security of local networks while dismissing the mourning for all that has been lost as mere nostalgia.
Nostalgia can discount progress and exaggerate the positives of a former way of life, while progress can discount what's been lost and exaggerate advances that are either marginal or actually destructive.
The concept of collective memory is useful because it sidesteps both the sentimentality of nostalgia and the conventional mindless cheerleading of progress. It forces us to examine what types of security and knowledge are being lost to "progress," and forces us to weigh what has been lost against what has been gained.
Summary of the Blog This Past Week
Do the Roots of Rising Inequality Go All the Way Back to the 1980s? 3/31/17
"Trickle Down" Has Failed; Wealth and Income Have "Trickled Up" to the Top .5% 3/30/17
When the "Solutions" Become the Problems 3/29/17
The Overlapping Crises Are Coming, Regardless of Who's in Power 3/28/17
Forget ObamaCare, RyanCare, and any Future ReformCare--the Healthcare System Is Completely Broken 3/27/17
Best Thing That Happened To Me This Week
Finished my tax returns--65 pages in total, including the Federal and State of California returns. Non-self-employed people are often amazed at this pile of paperwork, but there are multiple forms and worksheets to complete. It required 3 pages just to calculate my penalty for underpaying California estimated taxes for 2016--a penalty that came to the grand total of $3. Whew. TurboTax helps simplify the process, to be sure, but there are all sorts of bookkeeping bits that must be tracked and collected and you still need to know quite a lot about the tax codes to maximize whatever few legal tax breaks the average middle-class self-employed person qualifies for. It's a great relief to be done with this annual task.
Market Musings: Riding a 35-pound Bicycle in a Traffic Jam of 3,500-pound SUVs
Rather than post charts, I'm going to riff off an analogy that came to me the other day while riding my bicycle through heavy street traffic.
Investing whatever capital we can save is akin to riding a 35-pound bicycle in a constantly shifting and often risky flow of 3,500-pound vehicles.
If a 3,500-pound SUV cuts you off, there's nothing to be done except avoid injury. Ranting at the careless driver might offer emotional release but it doesn't accomplish much and might even distract you from the next hazard.
As a bicyclist in urban traffic, we must constantly be on the alert for potential dangers, especially those posed when drivers do the unexpected. As bicyclists, we must always be aware that the unexpected often happens: drivers run red lights, drivers don't see us, impatient drivers race through a 4-way stop, or courteous drivers wave us through and inadvertently set up a dangerous circumstance as other drivers are not so courteous.
As small investors, we're entering markets dominated by powerful forces--central banks, trading bots, bank trading desks, big speculators and institutional players. We have very little control over these forces, and must react promptly to avoid financial injury. Our awareness of risk must be ever-present, and we cannot afford to allow our minds to become distracted.
Our goal is to get from Point A in our financial plan to Point B, and we have to be fluid and responsive to heightened dangers congesting our initial route.
One way of summarizing this perspective is: as riders of 35-pound machines sharing financial markets with 3,500-pound vehicles, we must limit our exposure to unexpected but nonetheless common dangers. Traffic "should" flow in a steady fashion, and drivers "should" avoid risky behaviors. But traffic is often semi-chaotic, and drivers often become distracted or act out negative emotions. Our job is to minimize our exposure to the risks of unexpected swerves and lane changes.
This means limiting our exposure to assets that can be repriced (i.e. drop sharply) before we can escape the resulting pile up. Simply put: don't get fixed ideas about what is likely or unlikely. Is inflation "extremely unlikely"? The conventional view is yes. The bicyclist in me is asking "and so what happens when the 'extremely unlikely' happens?"
From Left Field
A world without retirement (via John D.)
A nation of landowners--?but for how long?
How Craft Beer’s Popularity Is Hurting Craft Beer
The 2017 Long-Term Budget Outlook (CBO)
Why Energy-Economy Models Produce Overly Optimistic Indications
Robots and Jobs: Evidence from US Labor Markets
Basic Income: A Sellout of the American Dream
The Health and Social Benefits of Nature and Biodiversity Protection (via Michel P.)
Billionaire bunkers: How the 1% are preparing for the apocalypse
Odd Lots: What the Berkshires Learned by Launching its Own Currency: A new spin on 'buy local (30-minute podcast)
Maybe the Economy Isn't the Reason Why So Many American Men Aren't Working Many experts have blamed a poor job market, but new research indicates that an overlooked cause may be poor health.
How the Social Justice Movement Fuels Corporate Capitalism
"We see many who are struggling against adversity who are happy, and more although abounding in wealth, who are wretched." Tacitus
Thanks for reading--
charles |
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